Fair Warning

How can a blog be "inquisitive"? Let me refer to our friends Merriam and Webster for some clarification here:

Main Entry: in·quis·i·tive
Pronunciation: in-'kwi-z&-tiv
Function: adjective
1 : given to examination or investigation
2 : inclined to ask questions; especially : inordinately or improperly curious about the affairs of others

A blog can neither be given to examination nor inclined to ask questions. Therefore, if I get one more generic "I read over your blog and found it inquisitive" comment, I'm going to visit the offender's blog and regale them with a lesson in vocabulary, starting with Merriam-Webster's own 2006 Word of the Year: Truthiness.

1. truthiness (noun)

1 : "truth that comes from the gut, not books" (Stephen Colbert, Comedy Central's "The Colbert Report," October 2005)
2 : "the quality of preferring concepts or facts one wishes to be true, rather than concepts or facts known to be true" (American Dialect Society, January 2006)

Smugymity Now

"I'd never be a member of any club that would have me as a member." It's an old adage attributed to Marxists and famously borrowed by Woody Allen. And while I've never been much into "clubbing" at all of any kind, I'm especially antipathetic to the loose gaggle of poets who decry one another's work on blogs and reviews, or publicly stroke one another's egos, boast about being published, and form insular networks to advance their own works. At the same time, I find myself fascinated by the "poetry community" - like a passerby looking through the glowing window of a wealthy home, the glory and dysfunction of its priveleged, self-satisfied, perpetually unfulfilled occupants equally inaccessible.

It's all so offputting, isn't it? Perhaps I should form a paparazzi of sorts, by turns smearing and glorifying poets without having to allow it in return. Then again, I'm not so excited about taking the GRE so that I can eat raman and grub about with snooty English graduate students and professors at the U.

Smug, Anonymous, and Membership Free... that's how I'll have to be.